Not a scrap of hair covered its great, muscular frame. Its skull was smooth red skin like molded putty, with features that were slight notches only: inset red eyes, a slight hill and twin slits for a nose, dark dimples for ears and that gaping round mouth like a black valve to nothing.
It knelt to take Julio's head in its great red hands, opening its black mouth wide and pressing it down across Julio's face. The freezing gale became a hurricane, which plucked Cerulean up and hurled him far, far away.
EAST
23. FREEFALL
He was standing by the Mississippi riverside, looking out over that broad body of muddy, swirling water. Thick bulrushes tickled at his elbows, while bees and other bugs hummed and buzzed nearby. A gray-skinned, white-eyed version of his old friend Zane was at his side.
"I told you," Zane said. He didn't look so handsome as he once had, with rags of skin hanging from his chin, and ears that didn't look to be on right, like a twisted mask. "The choice would come around, and you'd save the world."
Cerulean looked down. He was standing at the water's edge in mud that rose up over his bright white sneakers, sneaking icy cold water in between his toes.
"What choice is it?" he asked.
Zane smiled, unveiling a hole through the back of his throat through which Cerulean saw daylight. "The same one as always. You survived before, even when they broke your back and shoved your head under the water. That's a choice, Robert, to keep on. That has to be worth something."
He shrugged. "It's just being stubborn."
"Stubborn is a choice. We find our will where we can. Look at this."
He pointed, his dry zombie arm extended like a weathered wooden signpost, toward a red lump protruding from the water. The cold was round his ankles now. He looked down and saw dead frogs piling at his feet in tiny green pyramids. The cold was spreading into his calves now, taking away the sensation. His thighs were trembling.
Zane grinned, but now he wasn't Zane anymore, but Amo. There was a hole in the side of his head where he'd blown his brains out. His tongue waggled and his eyes were shriveled white blobs in their sockets, like old tea bags.
"You loved Anna," Amo said. "That was a choice. You protected her. As you do unto the least of these, you do also unto me."
Cerulean found he was weeping. The water was up to his knees now, and the frogs were mounding, and the red bump had risen through the water into the shape of a head. His legs trembled a final time and gave way, splashing him down into the thick mud on his knees.
"It's always hard," said Amo, but now it wasn't Amo anymore but Anna, a little five-year-old zombie standing at his side in her bright Alice in Wonderland dress. The dirty water came up to her waist. "When you can't stand you kneel, and if you can't kneel you get on your elbows and crawl. You've always understood this, Robert, what is there that's different now?"
"I can't do it," he muttered, as the river lapped over him. Control of his legs faded and he slumped from his knees to his side, held up on his arms barely above the surface. "I can't move, I can't fight. I'm not strong like Amo, I don't have any hope left to share. I'm sorry."
Her dead face twisted quizzically. "It's not about hope. Whoever told you that? Hope is easy, Robert. What kind of hope is it that dives? What kind of dive is it, that requires hope to make it work?"
He looked into her face. There were worms crawling inside her brain, through the open doors of her eyes. She gave him a pretty, corpse-gray smile.
"Then what?" he asked. "I don't have anything else to give."
She touched his cheek tenderly. "You have faith, father. Faith is blind, don't you know that by now? Every dive is an act of faith, and you wonder where Amo gets his strength from? He dived twice, and it was faith that brought him back both times."
He hung his head. The demon was almost upon him. "I don't have it now."
Anna took his chin and lifted it firmly. "You do. When you wrote the bible for Amo, did you hope he would ever read it? When you charged into the fight against three Orandelles, did you hope you would survive? No. You had faith; once in Amo, once in Zane, and now you need to have faith in yourself. There's nobody else, Robert, you're alone here, at a pivot point in our history, with all that you need. Have faith in yourself, and do what must be done."
He looked into the dark holes where her eyes should be, and let out a sob.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
"You never need to apologize to me," she answered. "Not ever again, for all you're about to do. Thank you."
The icy water rose over his head and the demon reached down.
* * *
He blinked back to himself in the sweaty corridor, gasping.
Before him Julio and the demon were clutched close like lovers, conjoined at the lips with the demon hunched over Julio, holding his head like an infant's in its huge red hands. Its shoulders heaved and there was a wet roaring noise, and tiny jets of red liquid spurted out from between their lips.
Julio's body thrashed. His eyes bulged and his stomach swelled, his legs kicked and his arms flailed at the giant's huge hands, but the demon didn't budge.
Cerulean realized what it was doing.
Vomiting into Julio's throat, like a mother bird feeding its children. He gagged as the demon's shoulders hunched and the wet roar came again, making Julio's legs scrape and beat on the floor.
Then it stopped. The demon rose up, trailing mucusy red spit from its round mouth. Julio gasped and burped and sagged to the side. His eyes rolled back in his head and bloody fluid frothed down his cheek.
The demon turned toward Cerulean. Its great red hands cradled his head like a child's and he was helpless before it. Its round black mouth loomed over him and its bright red eyes glinted with a pure, burning intensity, drawing closer like a planetary body moving into eclipse.
Just past its side he glimpsed Julio shaking on the concrete. A button on his shirt burst and clicked off the wall, then one of his pant leg's ripped as his body swelled; his arms thickened with muscle, his thighs bloomed like fat eggplants, his twisted shoulder unkinked and his skin shaded a subtle red.
Then the demon was all he could see, pressed close and stinking of bile. Its fingers squeezed and forced his mouth open, breaking his jaw with a sharp and crumpling pain. Its black mouth descended and closed over his lips, clamping into his cheeks in a cutting ring.
It heaved and the regurgitation began; hot liquid filled his mouth and throat, puffing out his cheeks and swallowing madly down, more than he could take.
His body convulsed and his eyes blazed wide, his throat gagged but the flow was too strong to push back, filling his belly and lungs. More and more came until he was just a bag filling to the seams, too drunk, too full, hurting beyond the point he could endure and further still, a wet rag of flesh shuddering in the wind.
Then it stopped. The demon's wet mouth sucked away and he sagged on his chains. Dizziness struck and he burped, tasting the acrid tang of bile. He tried to gag but couldn't, spitting up phlegmy foam instead.
The thing that was Julio laughed and gurgled on the floor, dressed in torn rags and almost doubled in size, pointing a meaty red arm at him.
Bitter cold filled his head. He tried to resist, as his withered legs filled out like water balloons and his arms thickened against the metal cuffs, but the cold was too strong. Every effort he pressed against it brought the cold down harder, squashing him into the back of his own mind, watching through a dim and small window as a burning new consciousness rose from the bag of sick in his middle.
Bright feverish spots flashed across his stretching skin, sensations that this new consciousness recognized; cold dots like blips on a radar for Julio and the demon, a hot red cluster for the bodies to his left, a horde of warm bodies to the south, and far, far away to the west, a raging bonfire urging him on.
On. His shackles burst and he dropped to his knees. To his left the demon, his brother, turned another one of the hot pulses cold, and he felt a deep satisfaction. This was his purpose now. To his right another brother was rising to his feet.
Julio.
He strode by, head halfway to the ceiling already. He was a brother, but the thin sliver of Cerulean still remembered he was Julio too, who'd raped the woman he'd once loved, who'd vowed to murder his daughter, who he should have killed on the very first day they met.
That thought gave him strength, even as the new consciousness thickened inside him like concrete. Faith, Anna had said, his daughter, and he remembered her voice through a drowning fog. Faith and flight, because every dive led into the unknown.
The mind inside him swelled, and the sliver that was Cerulean climbed a ladder; past the bag of bile, above the cold concrete, all the way to the platform at the top where at the edge he slowly lowered himself into arm-stand position.
Focus came.
This was why he dived, for these moments when he lost himself in the dance between his body and his mind, in pure focus where nothing else mattered. It blocked out the blood in his past, the graveyard that was New York, Julio, the lonely hotel room he'd once shared with Anna, everything.
He bent his arms then sprung upward, flinging himself into the air; an inward arm-stand dive like no one had ever done before in the history of competitive diving, because they didn't have faith.
The cold air caught him and spun him in searing somersaults, like a bullet spiraling down a barrel to exit velocity, that shot through Amo's mind and into Matthew's heart, that made a clear and blazing line of all his suffering and love, all for this.
He straightened at the last moment, his palms crunched into the side of the pool and burst a perfect ten-point hole in the concrete which he passed clean through, tearing through the cold and back out to himself.
He jerked to consciousness in the smoky, stinking, bloody corridor, swaying on feet he hadn't used for a decade. Everything was different and a fog filled his head. The cold was still lodged in his middle, grasping to pull him back down even as it laid thick bands of muscle on his limbs.
But it was still his body, at least for now.
He saw the thick red back just ahead. Julio. He looked down to see thick, powerful thighs holding him up. He almost wept to see them. His legs were back, and he remembered how to use them.
Three strides and he seized Julio by the head, then yanked as hard as he could. His back locked in place like a perfect pivot, and Julio rose over and upward like a wet towel in an arcing judo throw, so high his legs smacked off the ceiling, then-
CRUNCH
He struck the concrete floor bodily.
A second passed, then he looked up and got back to his feet, unhurt.
"What was that?" A woman's voice rang out from above. "What the hell was that, somebody explain to me what just happened!"
Julio's eyes burned red. His mouth was halfway towards becoming a toothless black hole as his cheeks and bones sucked inward. His skin was a ruddy pink and only the faint blotches of buckshot scars on his right cheek identified him.
"I know you're in there," Cerulean growled. His voice came out muffled, altered by his shifting body and throat, but something in Julio recognized it. His brows worked thunderously.
"Cerulean?" came his voice, a thin and sibilant hiss.
Cerulean dived.
His shoulder crunched into Julio's midriff and drove him backward against the great glass door, forcing out a whuff of air. He wrapped his arms around Julio's back, hoisted him onto his shoulder, then leapt, spun and body-slammed him into the ground.
"Ugh," grunted Julio.
Blood and black bile spewed from his mouth. Cerulean rolled on top and punched him in his shifting head; once, twice, three times, great thumps of his blooming knucklebones against Julio's thick skull.
But the shrinking bones of his face didn't break. His skin didn't tear, and there was no screaming except the cries of the woman overhead. He was wasting time, and the gasp of rising panic beat at him, scarcely able to breathe as the changes backed up within him.
He roared, drowning out everything, then shifted to wrap his arms in a tight chokehold around Julio's head. He wrapped his massive legs tight around Julio's chest. He set his back and he pull.
New muscles screamed and he drove them to their limits, squeezing with his legs and straining with his arms and back. Julio patted feebly at his arms as his neck stretched.
"He's not supposed to be doing that!" the woman shouted over the sound of tearing flesh. "That's not supposed to happen."
"Aaaarggggh!"
He screamed, wrenched on Julio's sweaty jaw a final trembling time, and with a sick tearing sound ripped his head clean off. His body flopped and the neck-hole disgorged like a shaken soda can, spraying out pressurized blood and guts that coated him from head to foot in gore.
Torn apart with his bare hands, as he'd always promised.
"Oh my God," the woman said. "Can't you stop it? Stop this thing before he kills them all!"
Julio's body sagged, fluid poured from the head cradled in Cerulean's arms, and he let it drop, thumping like a bowling ball on the floor. He rose back to his feet, holding off the weight of the new consciousness for a few moments longer. There was more yet to do.
The demon had infected others; the next was still kneeling where it had dropped from its chains, smaller than him. He dropped a meaty elbow into its back and it fell flat, following with a vicious stamp on its neck that produced a massive, flattening crunch. He braced one foot on its shoulder, bent to grip its head round the jaw and face, and pulled.
The shattered neck creaked, groaned and tore free. Hot fluids blew out like a wet firecracker, splattering Cerulean's red legs and hands. It was bloody work, but he was no stranger to crawling through the mire.
He began to laugh, a strange gasping bark through his round mouth.